Note to Rubio: Low-skilled immigrants work for America, too

Marco Rubio has often noted that he had a simple upbringing. So why does he want to complicate life for low-skilled immigrants?

"As I’ve said many times before, my parents were never rich people,” Rubio said during Tuesday’s debate on the Fox Business Channel. "My father was a bartender. My mother was a maid. They worked for a living."

How ironic that the son of blue-collar immigrants would argue that the United States should give priority to high-skilled immigrants.

Yet that’s what Rubio has been saying for the last few years, and the narrative that the 2016 Republican presidential candidate clings to whenever immigration comes up. He must consider it safer than defending his previous support for a path to citizenship for the undocumented, which has now been watered down to support for something that might be more feasible politically: green cards with a "very long" path to citizenship.

The immigration issue has always been tricky for Florida’s junior senator, even though he spent his first two years in the Senate largely avoiding the topic except to make clear that he opposed eliminating birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of the undocumented and supported Arizona’s immigration law which required local and state police to determine the legal status of anyone with whom they came into contact.

By 2013, when Rubio joined the so-called Gang of Eight in proposing a sweeping comprehensive immigration reform bill that cleared the Senate but ultimately died in the House of Representatives, the senator had already begun to make the argument — as he did in an interview with The Wall Street Journal early that year — that the U.S. economy would benefit from bringing in more high-skilled labor. This stance opened Rubio up to attacks from anti-immigrant conservatives who now masquerade as defenders of the working class.

Rubio has argued that any future stab at reform has to “modernize” legal immigration. It’s all about who gets in.

“I'm a big believer in family-based immigration,” Rubio told the Journal. "But I don't think that in the 21st century we can continue to have an immigration system where only 6.5% of people who come here, come here based on labor and skill. We have to move toward merit and skill-based immigration.”

Had this been U.S. policy in May 1956 — when, according to the St. Petersburg Times, naturalization records show that Rubio's parents, Mario and Oriales, came to the United States on immigration visas — Marco might have been born in Havana instead of Miami.

In the immigration debate, Americans hear a lot about racism and nativism. But, when the conversation turns to legal immigrants, and who gets in and who doesn’t, another ugly “-ism” often rears its head: elitism.

As a Mexican-American, of course, I’m bothered by untrue and unfair claims by demagogues that immigrants from Mexico are inferior to earlier waves that came from Europe a century ago. And I recognize it as a familiar pattern. A century ago, many Americans argued that the Italians and Irish were a cut below the German and English who came a hundred years earlier.

But as an American-Mexican — that is, someone who puts his nationality before his ethnicity — what really infuriates me is the insistence by many on the cultural right that our immigration system should favor educated and high-skilled immigrants. Some seem to think that getting into the United States should be like getting admitted to the Ivy League.

What the United States has always had going for it is not just that it’s an immigrant nation, and so it is guaranteed a steady stream of dreamers and doers with an ironclad sense of optimism. It also benefits from being the land of second chances, where down-on-their-luck immigrants go for one last opportunity after they’ve struck out elsewhere. In past centuries, there was no academic exam to get through the door. There was no sign out front that read: “PhD’s need only apply.” And as a result, once the United States took in the English, Germans, Italians and Irish — including lots of people no one wanted — and these people worked hard and made successful lives here, they felt an undying sense of affection, loyalty and gratitude to this country.

We’re not likely to get the same response from overly-educated and high-skilled immigrants who had their pick of countries that wanted them but wound up choosing the United States. These are the kind of folks who are likely to think they did us a favor by accepting our invitation.

Is Rubio right? Should we inject elitism into the immigration system? I can’t think of anything more un-American.